New Records on FamilySearch from November 2018

FamilySearch expanded its free online archives in November 2018 with almost 90 million new indexed family history records and almost 300,000 digital images from around the world. New historical records were added from Benin, Chile, Costa Rica, The Dominican Republic, England, Germany, Honduras, Ireland, Lesotho, Liberia, Nicaragua, Peru, and the United States, which includes California, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Native American Enrollment Records, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. New digital images were added from BillionGraves .

Find your ancestors using these free archives online, including birth, marriage, death, and church records. Millions of new genealogy records are added each month to make your search easier.

Over 6 billion searchable historic records are available from around the world on FamilySearch.org. Records are published with the help of thousands of volunteer indexers who transcribe digital copies of handwritten records to make them easily searchable online. To help make more historical records from the world’s archives available online, volunteer with FamilySearch Indexing.

What?!? Almost all, *if* not all, of these records are available to everybody throughout the world with access to some kind of computing device that can access them. Most of the people who use FamilySearch’s records are, themselves, not members of The Church. You only need to set up a very easy and free account with FamilySearch to access all the same indexed records that members access. The only ones all of us can’t view without further permission are the ones attached to special contracts that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have with the originating jurisdictions. Those are few compared to the many available to everyone, member or not; they must be viewed within the Family History Library in Salt Lake City or at a branch FamilySearch Center somewhere in the world.

I was doing an extensive project in Colombia and suddenly lost access to many records because, as you stated, of special contract obligations. So one can be working then suddenly lose access. This just happened again with a naturalization record I wanted to see in New York. I agree it is a relatively small %-age of the record total, but if it is “your” record, it is very frustrating and you apparently have no recourse.

Bud is definitely correct. I am an indexer/arbitrator/reviewer and I still can’t access many records unless at a Family History Center and there are none close to me. I used to be able to access some of them until ancestry.com learned about it. Then access was limited to LDS members only until a specific number of years had elapsed. This left the LDS hierarchy with the choice of losing volunteers or never having access to the records to anyone at all. At least now they are indexed and available to all eventually.

He has been involved in genealogy for more than 35 years. He
has worked in the computer industry for more than 40 years in hardware,
software, and managerial positions. By the early 1970s, Dick was already
using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards. He
built his first home computer in 1980.